In order to monitor and understand driving behavior using mobile phone sensor data, it is often necessary to accurately determine whether the vehicle is being driven (e.g., to detect start of driving accurately, to collect data for entire duration of drive, etc.). However, it is important to do this both accurately and efficiently (e.g., while minimizing battery consumption, wasted computational effort, etc.) given various alternative uses and onboard power limitations of mobile devices.
Thus, there is a need in the vehicle monitoring field to create a new and useful system and method for monitoring vehicle motion using a mobile device. This invention provides such a new and useful system and method.